Across much of the United States, spring is in full force. With warmer weather, people are taking their furry family members out on longer walks and spending more time outside. Alongside blooming flowers and trees, your pet might run into a small, unassuming grass seed pod known as a foxtail. Despite the cute name, foxtails can pose a major threat to your pet’s health.
I am a veterinarian in California’s Central Valley, and foxtails are a daily issue where I work, especially during the spring and summer months.
What exactly are foxtails?
Hordeum murinum, or wall barley, is a common source of foxtails.
Curtis Clark/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
A foxtail isn’t a specific plant. It is a type of grass seed pod that resembles a fox’s tail. Multiple species of grass can create this type of seed pod, and foxtails are found across much of the United States. Regions of the western U.S., especially California, have the most foxtails.
The outside of the foxtail is covered in small sticky hairs designed to stick to things. You can feel them yourself if you pull a foxtail off a plant. Rub your fingers against the seed one way, and then the other, and you’ll feel that one direction is smooth and the other direction is sticky.
Foxtails aren’t a big deal for people, as we don’t have a lot of hair and tend to remove things that are itchy or painful, but it’s a different story for pets.
A segment of the foxtail pod sticks to an animal’s fur, where it’s carried around until it eventually drops off and grows into grass. This sticky feature is great for the grass, as it helps spread the seeds around, but it also results in foxtail segments getting stuck to pets.
Once on the cat or dog, a segment of a foxtail can burrow into the skin, get stuck in the eyes, creep into ears, be inhaled into the nose, or even make its way into the lungs.
The health dangers of foxtails
The most common place where foxtails will burrow into a pet is the skin, especially in between dogs’ toes. A foxtail embedded into the skin can cause irritation, redness, pain and infection. As the foxtail gets deeper into the skin, it brings harmful bacteria with it and creates a path of infection known as a draining tract.
If a foxtail makes it into a dog’s or a cat’s ear, the pet will likely start shaking its head back and forth – it might look like it has an ear infection. The embedded foxtail can cause discomfort and sometimes infection.
A foxtail can stick to a pet’s eye tissues, especially in cats, and migrate around the outer portions of the eye or behind the third eyelid, which is the protective tissue near the inner corner of their eye. This will cause discharge from the eye and discomfort and may scratch the eye’s surface.
One of the most serious locations for a foxtail is in the lungs. Dogs may inhale foxtails while running through fields and breathing hard. The foxtail can sometimes get stuck in…
